By Leeza Joseph
New Delhi, July 30, 2020: The disruption the coronavirus has created in our societies means that vulnerable people, especially children, are even more likely to become victims of human trafficking, abuse and exploitation.
The government put the whole 1.3 billion population of India under lockdown from the midnight of March 24. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy on May 12, more than 122 million people in India lost their jobs. Around 75 percent of them were small traders and daily wage-labourers. When families are economically unstable, this raises the vulnerability to children.
According to the data from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, on July 21 India had 402,529 active cases, 724,577 cured/discharged, and 28,084deaths from Covid-19.
At one point during lockdown in India, over the course of 11 days, 92,000 cases of child abuse in the family and in the communities were reported to the government helpline
One father, who had lost his job because of the pandemic, sold his four-month-old child to a rich couple without the mother knowing. When the couple came to take the baby, the mother called their neighbours to help keep the baby. The man was a daily wage worker in construction and because he had no work and couldn’t feed his family. So, he sold the baby in desperation.
There has also been an increase in child marriage. Families marry off their young daughters so there’s one less mouth to feed. We’ve come across cases where children as young as 12 have been trafficked into a forced marriage.
Thousands of children have lost out on education in villages where there isn’t access to internet and no engagement from the side of school. There could be possibility of an increase in child labor when the normalcy begins.
Caritas India is working to help vulnerable children by supporting peer-to-peer learning, psychosocial support, positive engagement with children for example painting, and poster making, sports. We work with partner organisations to provide children with educational material so they can keep up education.
The members of Child Parliament are engaged in creating awareness against Covid-19 through campaign and addressing concerns of children in the villages.
We’re looking at how to give greater support to families by linking them to job entitlements. The government of India has announced the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan (GKRA, Campaign to generate jobs for the welfare of the poor ) to address the issues of returnee migrants and similarly affected rural population by Covid-19 and an increase support to existing National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme.
Caritas India is supporting the migrant workers to avail these government schemes.
We’ve reached through 173 diocesan partners to some 1,465,407 migrants across the country in different ways – basic needs, food, masks, shelter, personal protective equipment (PPE), government entitlements etc. By helping migrants, we hope to prevent them and their children from falling into trafficking.
An important aspect of our work is prevention. To create awareness, we’ve produced a song in Hindi about the risks of human trafficking and also printed brochures, leaflets and we go around in the communities playing the song and distributing the information materials.
We’re also training police, so they are able to identify victims of human trafficking. This isn’t always easy as with COVID-19 there are other forms of trafficking emerging such as cybercrime involving children. People target them online, groom them and try to meet them to abuse them.
It’s difficult to find and support the victims of human trafficking because there is no movement during lockdown. All the stakeholders have to work in partnership to address the heinous crime like trafficking in persons.
Caritas India is strongly working in the communities, strengthening the community mechanisms like village child protection committees to prevent child trafficking. We are also closely working with local governance, village leaders to create a safety net for children. We sensitise and train the transport department workers- bus drivers, auto drivers, rickshaw pullers, potters at the railway stations to identify the trafficked person and inform the respective officers.
As our governments in many parts of the world are now focusing on health, many other issues, such as crime and trafficking, are taking a back seat. We need to adopt a whole of government approach and whole of society approach to be able to combat human trafficking effectively at a community, national and global level. Governments and civil society need to work together to make a difference.
Though Covid 19 was a health concern, government involved whole sectors, departments, government machinery, Civil Society Organisations, businesses and corporates to address the pandemic. In the similar way, there is a need to take holistic approach to prevent trafficking in persons and protect 
(Leeza Joseph is thematic manager of the department of Migration and Anti Human Trafficking in Caritas India. We are sharing her article on July 30, the World Day against Trafficking in Persons.)